SAP Service Management: Warranty Claims

By Mike Piehl

This book is both a how to manual and a reference guide for configuring SAP Warranty Claims. It provides you with a quick start guide to implementing claims and recalls. Then walks you through to see how the process will look for the user, and finally all the individual pieces of configuration that make up the process. This book allows you to successfully configure SAP Warranty Claims.

When I looked for help to understand warranty claims within SAP. I quickly realized there was a gap in the material. There was very little material that talked about warranty claims or how to configure them. I could find bits and pieces, but nothing to give me the full picture. So I decided to pull it all together into one place.
This book is both how to manual and a reference guide. The idea is that the initial sections of the book will provide you with a quick start guide to implementing warranty claims in SAP. Then I provide a walk through to see how the process will look for the user, and finally all the individual pieces of configuration that make up the process. It includes in all of the following areas:
* Explanation of Warranty Claims and how it works
* Example walk-through of the common processes
* Setting up the Claim
* Configuring the required master data
* Advanced rule creation (VSR)
* Reporting
This is THE comprehensive guide to SAP Warranty Claims configuration. If I missed anything you need to know, let me know and I'll add it to the book.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Mike Piehl
• Release date: Nov 21, 2016
• ISBN: 9781370368556

Mike Piehl

Mike’s SAP Expertise is in Customer Service/Service Management, Variant Configuration and Sales Distribution. Mike focuses on the technical development of SAP applications using ABAP, ABAP Objects, BSP and ABAP Web Dynpro. Mike began working in SAP in 1995 as an intern who needed to learn how to implement Variant Configuration in R/3 3.0F. Mike worked at SAP and Deloitte before becoming an independent consultant.Mike created Paper Street Enterprises (PSE) in 2006 with a mission to provide the best consulting knowledge in SAP Service Management and Variant Configuration. PSE focused on helping small to midsized manufacturing companies implement and streamline their service and engineering processes. Mike has worked in the mining equipment, telecommunications equipment and high tech manufacturing industries to realize the full potential of SAP Service Management and Variant Configuration.In 2008, Mike began the journey into application design. The first application, called Rapier, provided an out of the box customer self-service SM website using BSP technology. Mike became an SAP Partner in 2011 and received his first ABAP Add-on SAP certified. Since then, he’s led the development of SAP applications has evolved into a suite of products called Renovation that focuses on simplifying and streamlining the Service Management processes. Renovation includes a Service Management dashboard, and multiple other applications to make using SAP SM easier. Renovation continues to grow and evolve into the premier Service Management application suite.In 2012, Mike (Paper Street Enterprises) and Mike Golden (Discrete Manufacturing) created the joint venture of JaveLLin Solutions, LLC. Mike Piehl is the Chief Technical Officer, responsible for all the systems and development initiatives. He is the expert in Service Management and Variant Configuration.

Book preview

SAP Service Management

Warranty Claims

Published by Mike Piehl at Smashwords

Copyright 2016 Mike Piehl

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Smashwords Edition, License Notes

This eBook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This eBook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite eBook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

Contents

Part A - Introduction

A1. How to Read this Book

A2. Warranty Claims

A2a. What is it?

A2b. Why should you use it?

A2c. What parts of it do you need?

Part B – The Basics

B1. Terminology

B2. Steps of the Claim

B3. Claim Categories

Part C - The Warranty Claims Process

C1. Overview of the Claim Flow

C2. Post-Crediting Example

C3. Recall Example

C4. Claim Splitting

C5. Claims with goods to be returned

C6. Authorized Goodwill

Part D – The Scenarios

D1. Pre/Post Crediting Claims

D1a. Claim Splitting

D1b. Claims with goods to be returned

D1c. Authorized Goodwill

D2. Recalls

Part E – Configuration

E1. General Settings

E2. Define Number Ranges for Warranty Claims

E3. Define Warranty Claim Types

E4. Warranty Claim

E5. Layout

E5a. Define Screen Layouts

E5b. Define User Profile

E5c. Define Pushbutton Profiles

E5d. Define Message Groups

E5e. Define Message for Direct Display

E6. Control Data

E6a. Process Control

E6b. Copying Control

E6c. VSR Checks

E6d. Warranty Check

E7. Pricing

E8. Message Determination

E9. Revenue Account Determination

EA. Accounting

EB. Partner Determination

EC. Dealer Portal

Part F – Master Data

F1. The Customer Warranty Partner Type

F2. Vendors (Claimants)

Part G – Transactions in Warranty Claims

Part H – Frequently Asked Questions

Part I – Conclusion

Part J – About the Author

Introduction

For any of you that have ever configured the warranty claims for the first time, you’ll probably notice that same thing that I did.  There isn’t a whole lot of help out there on the internet.  That’s why I’m writing this book.  I haven’t implemented everything about warranty claims, but I’ve done several working models and wanted to make it easier for someone out there who might be doing it for the first time.  The Warranty Claims module I’ll be talking about is in SAP ERP 6.0.  I believe warranty claims may go back as far as 4.6 or 4.7.  Regardless, most everything I discuss in this book will apply no matter what version of SAP you’re implementing in.

How to read this book

The majority of this book should be used a reference guide. I expect very few people to read this from start to finish. This book will provide you the ins and outs of setting up and using warranty claims in SAP, and attempt to give you the best practice for using claims.

You’ll notice that in the scenarios section, certain sections have an asterisk after them (*). Those are the sections I believe you MUST configure every time you setup warranty claims. While some of them may only need to be configured once for an entire company, all of them must be configured at least once for each implementation.

That’s not to say that the other sections are less important. Just they contain features that may or may not be useful to an implementation. If you want to get the most out of warranty claims, I encourage you to look through everything. But if you’re in a hurry and want to get claims up and running right now, pay close attention to each section with the (*).

Warranty Claims

What are they?

Warranty claims are the SAP provided method of handling any claims from a customer or third party.  You will typically use warranty claims in any event where the reimburser (whomever is actually paying for the repair) does not do the warranty/repair work, but rather outsources the work to another party (the claimant) and pays them for the time and materials.  Keep in mind that the party that does the work can be a subsidiary of your own company, or even a regional office.  The main concept behind the claims model is that you will be paying someone else to perform the repair.

SAP has built in the option to use IDOC’s to load in many of the steps of the claim, or you can process it all manually.  We will focus primarily on the manual steps, mostly because if you can do it manually, the IDOC method just is a quicker way to load the information.

Why should you use it?

First, do you deal with warranty claims, or just warranty? This subtle question will help you determine if you need anything further from this book. Within SAP, warranty claims was originally designed for the automotive industry. Since dealerships work with nearly infinite repair shops to perform warranty maintenance, recalls, etc. This method was designed to handle all of the claims that could come from the car owner, or from the repair shops. Claims is the process that allows you accept a request for warranty work to be done, then passing that work onto another vendor. You organization never has to see the repair work, simply just pass on the repair to the appropriate vendor, then get the amount that it cost to repair, parts, etc. Then you can invoice your customer for any additional work that was not covered under warranty. Of course, there are all the connections with finance, service and SD. The vital piece of this description is that you are paying someone else to perform the service.

If you do the service yourself and are looking for a method to capture warranty dollars spent and maybe some metrics of what went wrong to pass on to your quality department, you don’t need warranty claims. You would be implementing a very transaction intensive process that really provides little benefit. The moral is, don’t make your life any harder than you need to.

If you find that you deal with 3rd party repair shops, or perhaps treat a different branch of your company like a 3rd party, then claims is the engine that will give you what you need. The flexible screen design, ability for validations and substitutions, and robust version functionality provide a great platform to build your solution. To top it off, it includes integration with SD and CS.

As a side note, if you need even more powerful functionality, you can look into SAP solution ACS. That is beyond the scope of this book.

What parts of this do you need?

I will attempt to keep this book as generic as possible and cover all the major aspects. So in order for you to get the most of it, you must first do a little homework. Consider this your blue printing phase. You will really need to determine all of the following:

Who are you dealing with?

The next question is to determine who you will be dealing with for the claims. Can any of your customers request a warranty claim? How many customers do you have? Or will only a limited number of distributors ever send you a claim?

What about vendors? Do you have a large number of vendors that will perform the work? Are they currently in SAP?

All of this matters when you determine how much master data you need to update in order to start using claims.

When do you pay the customer?

This will drive the answer to using pre or post crediting claims. The biggest difference is when you pay the customer? Will you send the customer money even before the job is done? Maybe a replacement part? Or do you need to get the report back from the vendor before releasing any funds?

What information do you NEED to capture?

This is always one of the most challenging questions. Typically, you have a group that wants all the data. We live in a big data society after all, why not capture everything and sort it out later? Well, there is a very obvious answer to that. Someone needs to enter in all that data, visit multiple screens, multiple tabs, execute lots of pull downs and clicks, to